February 21, 2012

“I built a mouse trap using an infrared motion sensor wall switch, an extension cord, a paper towel tube and a mini shop-vac. peanut butter is the bait. The mouse goes in the tube. The sensor senses it and turns on the shop-vac for 3 seconds. And voom, the mouse is inside the shop-vac. The sensor turns off the shop-vac. And it’s ready to catch the next mouse. No re-setting. No mess. No kidding.”

Sometimes the minimalist “gets the cheese” so to speak. Excellent job. I may have to implement this in my arsenal. Not sure of the “mouse will suffer for a long time” comment, a regular snap trap will not always kill instantly and I have seen a many struggling mice. I will take the little rodent “suffering” over the wife’s suffering and the anxiety of another mouse in the house and my wasted hours waiting to take him out with the air rifle. Traps don’t always work on those mutant mice who have been “wet-wired” you know. Little buggers.

My Shop-Vac Electronic Mousetrap attachment is not cruel at all. Notice the picture of the unharmed mouse in picture. Actually right after I took that picture, the mouse jumped out and ran very quickly under a counter. No problem. I put some water in the vac and it caught him again, but this time the mouse did not get away. It’s a prototype. A gift to the world.

[…] guess it isn’t as bad as getting caught in a traditional mousetrap, but it still sucks. Some clever engineering turned this shop vac into a giant mouse sucking machine. When a mouse trips the sensor it is ingested and held in the chamber for disposal later. I […]

imho, the only good mouse is a dead one. If you catch/release the live mouse, they will most likely just come back again and I really don’t want to train the mice to avoid the traps over the long haul. As it is, I had one mouse that was very proficient at cleaning the bait out of the trap without setting it off. I figured the trap might be defective in some way so I put down a new trap without doing anything with the old one. The mouse then proceeded to clean out the new trap, but then got greedy and went back to the first one that had no bait in it. Well – that was the end of that. Took 4 days to get rid of that sucker…

I had a mouse eat the bait off the spring trap, that’s why I made this. The shop-vac wins every time. All the mouse has to do is look in the tube and the sensor sets off the vac.
I thinking the Shop-Vac mousetrap would be practical at an industry that has a lot of mice, where poison is not a good thing, like a peanut butter factory. Are they using poison now or do they a have an army of guys cleaning up and setting spring loaded traps or those horrible glue traps?
Also I’d like to point out this is a prototype. It can be customized to do whatever you’d like to the mice after it caught.
The point is to first catch the little beast before it eats the loaf of bread the kids left on the kitchen counter. Or peas and poops on everything.
Thanks for the comments.

Wait till my dog gets into this. I suppose the sensor won’t shut off and she will just have this paper towel cylinder suctioned to her nose. (It would serve her right.) Can you make a great big one for the fridge?